After releasing a revised financial forecast for FY 2011 that predicts an annual .3 billion loss, its third in the last four years, NEC announced it will cut around 10,000 jobs. Bloomberg Businessweek reports President Nobuhiro Endo announced the cuts, revealing most of the cuts will come from the company’s mobile-phone handset business, with 7,000 of them expected to be in Japan. The company reportedly had 115,840 employees as of March so there should be a few folks left around to keep the lights on and maintain ventures like its new JV with NTT Docomo, Panasonic, Samsung and Fujitsu, the NEC Lenovo PC alliance, and its recently announced work on the Hayabusa 2 asteroid explorer. Still, we’ll have to wait and see how the cuts affect upcoming cellphones, like any potential successors to its super-slim MEDIAS N-04C seen above.

Continue reading NEC will cut 10,000 jobs after forecasting .3 billion annual loss, mostly in mobile phone biz

NEC will cut 10,000 jobs after forecasting .3 billion annual loss, mostly in mobile phone biz originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may be Christmas Eve Eve and the fourth day of Hannukah, but so far, this has felt like just another week in the consumer electronics biz. Another loco crazy, pre-CES, sink-or-swim, walk-a-dozen-miles-to-charge-your-cell kind of week. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a couple of nice presents for you…including, of course, your very own Engadget Podcast.

Host: Brian Heater, Tim Stevens
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Just a Dream

01:37 – Engadget Distro now available on Android Market and iOS Newsstand!
04:46 – AT&T abandons T-Mobile merger plans (updated)
11:02 – Sony PlayStation Vita review (Japanese edition)
24:38 – Microsoft’s CES 2012 keynote won’t deliver ‘significant news,’ more of ‘a wrap-up’
32:09 – SOPA hearing delayed until the new year as petition signatures top 25k
35:47 – T-Mobile, Motorola respond to Senator Franken’s Carrier IQ questions
37:20 – Two days in the desert with Apple’s lost founder, Ron Wayne
41:55 – Fusion Garage’s website goes dark — has it bitten the dust? (update: it’s back?)
45:00 – The Engadget Interview: Fusion Garage’s Chandra Rathakrishnan… post-fallout
50:02 – Indian villagers walk a dozen miles to charge cellphones
53:14 – Listener questions

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Filed under: Podcasts

Engadget Podcast 269 – 12.23.2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You are able to a lot of things that men and women say about apple iphones. ipod device testamonials are published all round the web and there’ll come to be bad or good reviews accessible for the interested readers.

And listed below are the explained ipod device reviews available online:

Pros of ipod touch

Through the years, music enthusiasts have acknowledged the crisp seem created within the Apple iphone. ipod device reviews have always tried to describe all the music experience definitely is gone through by the listener and each and every record song appears to become performed live. Aside this, the characteristics that men and women wrote to their ipod device reviews. Points that they love about Apple ipod devices:

1. Apple ipod touch reviews stated the difficult disk holds above 5000 tunes. Now, the dpi of tunes is sufficient that the user wouldn’t manage to pay attention to no exception song twice.

2. Apple ipod nano reviews discloses the tough disk gives the forty gb of storage area.

3. Apple ipod device reviews comes with a ergonomic design the Click Wheel. Making use of the Click Wheel, customers could very well search through the controls of either move forward, play, reverse, stop and quit. Apple mp3 customers will even access the menus when using Click Wheel.

4. Apple mp3 reviews also counted the lengthy battery existence of up to 12 hrs as very handy towards the picture of Apple mp3 player. What’s the using of storing about 5 1000 tunes inside teh Apple iphone when the battery wouldn’t last until the whole tunes seem to have been performed.

5. Apple mp3 player reviews also listed the ability of customers to prepare play lists just around the Apple mp3.

6. Apple ipod devices reviews also lists the shuffle function on the noticably objective of the ipod device. It makes a feeling of randomness above the play list eliminating monotony in the user.

7. Apple iphone reviews says the Apple ipod devices is definitely an excelent audio player. This is now because of four reasons:

a. Recption menus system for the Apple mp3 player is super-intuitive.

b. The seem quality is great. Although, other customers contend the Apple mp3 could be better sounding through other earphones.

c. The storage size for Apple ipod nano in accordance with its measures are an added bonus.

d. Lastly, but certainly not minimal, they think about this very important 1000′s of add-ons inside Apple mp3 to select from.

Cons of ipods on the market

1. Apple ipod device reviews says publish sales services for the Apple ipod devices aren’t good. The service warranty of Apple apple ipods doesn’t cover “abuse,” which alone is certainly an general term. Service stores of this Apple mp3s sometimes reason why the deterioration inside apple ipods was triggered around the abuse belonging to the user.

2. Apple iphone reviews include revealed posts that whenever the warranty from your ipod device expired, strange things begun to occur with the ipod device. The Apple ipod device should be skip-free, with plenty battery existence to last and also a robust hard drive.

Following the warranty year, however, it was eventually reported ipod device began missing, hard disk usually unsuccessful as well as the battery existence then grew to become somewhat shorter.

3. Apple ipod devices reviews have got says the Apple ipod touch appear to develop a software bug or design flaw. Tracks being performed should flow continuously from just one track to an. The Apple ipod nano, however, sometimes blanks out if you’ll between tracks.

4. Apple ipod devices reviews also says customers wish that Apple is going to make the recording player more perfect. This way would shatter the competitors making Apple iphone the main ipod.

5. Apple mp3 reviews also remarked that customers have an periodic downside to the iTunes. Also, isn’t even close to with a MAC OS sometimes have issues realizing ipod device when blocked. Additionally, it occassionally freezes up.

6. Apple mp3 player reviews also says Apple ipod nano are often afflicted with static throughout coat pocket. This generate the Apple mp3 to arbitrarily turn off occassionally.

7. Apple mp3 reviews also reviewed the battery existence expectancy in the Apple mp3 player is realistic providing the consumer would abstain from the rear light additionally, the equalizer from the device.

Perfectly found on the Apple iphone reviews, the tunes enthusiasts uses other things simsilar towards the Apple iphone for example Creative Jukebox 3, Nuvo Mp3′s, Archous Jukebox, Rio, Fist Very good music player, Creative Muvo2. Creative Zen Xtra, Creative Zen Touch, The new sony minidisc player, Siemens SL-45 Music player, and The new sony WM-D6 Professional.

It’s easy to shrug off technical achievements like this while real-world data speeds still lag so far behind. Nevertheless, the adrenalin junkies at Nokia Siemens Services insist their latest HSPA+ platform will be commercially available to carriers by the end of next year and, to prove it actually works, they’ve been demoing at PT Expo Comm in Beijing. The technology uses the latest 3GPP standardization to hog eight 42Mbps frequency channels at the same time, delivering a peak throughput of 336Mbps. Sure, it doesn’t come close to the 1Gbps speeds we’ve seen from Ericsson with LTE-Advanced, but if it gets here first we’ll have it.

[Thanks, Alan]

Continue reading Nokia Siemens makes multi-carrier HSPA+ hurtle at 336Mbps

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia Siemens makes multi-carrier HSPA+ hurtle at 336Mbps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the aftermath of the London riots, Britain’s prime minister has said the government is considering blocking people from using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and a British MP has compared this kind of shutdown to closing a road or shutting down train service during an emergency. Today in the Wall Street Journal, a columnist makes effectively the same argument, saying a ban on social media does not violate the principle of freedom of speech, and “techno-utopians” are getting worried about nothing. But are they? Or are these kinds of moves a step on a slippery slope that leads to Chinese-style control over information networks?

A reasonable compromise?

In his WSJ column, Gordon Crovitz says that British prime minister David Cameron and his allies were “widely ridiculed” for suggesting they might shut down access to social media, but argues that such restrictions are reasonable, and ”permitting peaceful protests while stopping violence seems like a reasonable compromise.” The WSJ columnist notes that the Bay Area Rapid Transit authorities shut off cell service on the system’s platforms because of a threatened protest (which my colleague Erica wrote about last week), and says this was a success because “the world did not end.” Crovitz adds:

[A]ll uses of technology are not equally virtuous. Enthusiasm for technology should not lead to a moral and political relativism that confuses crime with free speech and the British police with authoritarian governments.

Of course, Crovitz doesn’t say how a social-media or cellphone shutdown (or both) would allow the British government — or anyone else, for that matter — to “permit peaceful protests while stopping violence.” Presumably, it would allow people to protest so long as they didn’t want to communicate with each other via the Internet or their cellphones about those peaceful protests. But that’s part of the problem with such an approach: It prevents everyone from using these tools, regardless of their intent.

In other words, the BART blockade prevented people from using their phones for peaceful or even emergency purposes as well as nefarious purposes — all because the agency was afraid of a protest that never actually occurred. Is that a fair trade? What if someone at those stations had been trying to call the hospital or the police?

China and Iran are watching us

Foreign-policy writer Evgeny Morozov has also written a piece in the Wall Street Journal that makes reference to the London riots and the desire of the authorities to shut down or restrict access to communication networks and social-media tools. But in his column, entitled “Repressing the Internet, Western-Style,” Morozov warns that advocates of such behavior should be aware that repressive governments in countries such as China and Iran are watching what Western democracies do, and that every infringement of liberties will be taken as a vindication of their own repressive behavior.

Britain’s prime minister isn’t the only one considering a social-media shutdown. In a series of comments posted to Twitter in the wake of the London riots, MP Louise Mensch said that she sees the shutdown of all social-media and other communication networks as no different from the police closing a road during an emergency. “If in a major national emergency police think Twitter and FB should take an hour off? So be it,” she wrote. “I don’t have a problem with a brief temporary shutdown of social media just as I don’t have a problem with a brief road or rail closure.” She went on to say:

If short, necessary and only used in an emergency, so what. We’d all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots… Social media isn’t any more important than a train station, a road or a bus service… If riot info and fear is spreading by Facebook & Twitter, shut them off for an hour or two, then restore. World won’t implode.

This kind of argument that “the world didn’t end” or “the world won’t implode” if governments restrict access to communication networks is part of the problem: It encourages us to see such behavior as fine so long as there isn’t a massive negative outcome. But despite Crovitz’s blasé response to the idea, every subsequent shutdown or restriction chips away at important principles like freedom of speech. Do governments have the right to restrict those kinds of things in certain emergency situations? Sure they do. But those situations should be chosen very carefully, and we should force the authorities who do so to justify that choice.

Speech needs to be protected in all its forms

Aren’t these kinds of restrictions just like closing a road, as Louise Mensch argues? No. Public speech, of the kind that social-media tools like Twitter and Facebook allow — not to mention cellphone or other networks — isn’t like driving to the store for a carton of milk, where a mild inconvenience is not a big deal. Advocates of a shutdown like to claim that no one has a right to use Twitter, or that such tools are inconsequential and frivolous, and so a ban doesn’t matter. But restricting speech is wrong, no matter what tool the speaker is using to distribute it, or how silly we think the service is.

In his column, Crovitz says that “the kind of thuggish behavior on display in Britain… is often just below the surface of civilized societies.” He’s right. But then, so is the urge of governments and other authorities to smother or restrict speech — purely for peace-keeping purposes, of course, and in the interests of public safety. He and Louise Mensch may be convinced that they know where to draw the line, but history has shown us it’s all too easy to blur that line, and difficult to stop that process once it begins.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Garry Knight and Jennie Moo

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